Time to Remove Bush/Cheney: U.S. v. Bush et al.: conspiracy to defraud the people of America.
Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega talks about her conspiracy to commit fraud case against the president and his men: United States v. Bush et al., how they manipulated the American people and why impeachment is especially important during wartime.
MP3 here. (28:58)
Worst Secretary of War Ever: Roger Morris takes a look at the corrupt legacy of Donald Rumsfeld.
Roger Morris explores both the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” of Donald Rumsfeld’s emblematic history and legacy, of his long march to power, and what he did with that power once it was in his hands. He’s got a great two–piece look at Don Rumsfeld on Tomdispatch.com.
Roger Morris, who served in the State Department and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, resigned in protest at the invasion of Cambodia. He then worked as a legislative advisor in the U.S. Senate and a director of policy studies at the Carnegie Endowment. A Visiting Honors professor at the University of Washington and Research Fellow of the Green Institute (his work appears on its website), he is an award-winning historian and investigative journalist, including a National Book Award Silver Medal winner, and the author of books on Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and the Clintons. More recently, he co-authored with Sally Denton The Money and the Power, a history of Las Vegas as the paradigm of national corruption. His latest work, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of U.S. covert interventions and policy in the Middle East and South Asia over the past half-century, will be published in 2007 by Knopf.
The Bush Agenda: Who is going to end up in control of all that Iraqi oil?
Antonia Juhasz, a Tarbell Fellow at Oil Change International and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time explains the terms of the recently leaked 29-page Iraqi oil law and the role that control over Iraqi oil played as a motivating factor in the U.S. invasion.
Antonia Juhasz is the Ida Tarbell Fellow at Oil Change International, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, and a former Project Director at the International Forum on Globalization. She is also a Project Censored Award recipient and co-author of Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible, 2 nd Ed. Her articles have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Cambridge University Review of International Relations Journal, and the Johannesburg Star. Her new book is The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time (Regan Books of Harper Collins Publishers, April 2006).
American Religious Leaders Against the Next War: Mennonite minister travels to Iran in attempt to make peace.
J. Daryl Byler, a Mennonite minister and attorney in Iran talks about his delegation of different American religious leaders’ trip to Iran in an attempt to stave off war, their meetings with various ayatollahs, the Iranian people’s love for Americans, whether or not he’s on a Potemkin tour, and his upcoming meeting with Ahmadinejad.
His open letter to George W. Bush.
J. Daryl Byler is director of the Mennonite Central Committee’s Washington Office. He is an ordained Mennonite minister and an attorney. Before taking his current position, he served for six years as pastor of Jubilee Mennonite Church and as a staff attorney with East Mississippi Legal Services, both in Meridian, Miss. Daryl is married to Cynthia Lehman Byler, an elementary school teacher, and they have three children, Jessica and Holden (Eastern Mennonite University students), and Jeremy (a high-school freshman in D.C.). In connection with his current work, Daryl follows and writes about U.S. policy affecting the Middle East, and he has traveled frequently to the region, including visits to Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, retreats and running.
The news that The New Republic is going bi-weekly has got to be good news all ’round. To begin with, the magazine has always been in the vanguard of the War Party: it heralded the onset of World War I, agitated for U.S. intervention in the world’s second great calamity, supported the Vietnam war, emerging as the “liberal” wing of the cold war crusaders, and — true to form — was in the forefront of the pro-Iraq war forces. Although the editors have since seen fit to apologize for their zeal to invade Iraq, the decidedly antiwar tilt of public opinion has exacted a high price in the marketplace.
While political magazines are not exactly moneymakers, and have traditionally been subsidized by rich ideologues with an axe to grind, the decline of TNR’s circulation has been precipitous: from 110,000 down to 50,000 and dropping. Sold to CanWest Communications, a Canadian conglomerate, and shorn of editor Peter Beinart, TNR is positioning itself as the left-wing of the possible. In 2004, when the editor of the magazine published a mea culpa, of sorts, on their support for the war, they entitled it “Were We Wrong?” Back then, they weren’t so sure, but today Foer insists: “The question mark is gone.”
The war wasn’t the only thing Foer & Co. were wrong about, however: Foer wrote a piece for TNR gleefully predicting the swift demise of The American Conservative — a magazine which took the opposite stance from TNR’s on the war — which he referred to as “Buchanan’s surefire flop.” Yet the really big flop is TNR and its Scoop Jackson-Harry Trumanesque brand of “muscular” liberal interventionism, which is today indistinguishable from neoconservatism. Back in ’02, Foer exulted:
Over time it has become clear that on this side of the Atlantic, 9/11 hasn’t boosted the isolationist right; it has extinguished it. Instead of America Firstism, September 11 has produced a war on terrorism that has virtually ended conservative qualms about expending blood and treasure abroad. And as a corollary, it has produced an unprecedented eruption of conservative and evangelical support for Israel. … In short, Buchanan and his rich friends couldn’t have chosen a worse time to start a journal of the isolationist right. … no one on the right is listening anymore. A CBS News” poll from last month shows that 94 percent of Republicans approve of the president’s handling of the war.
Those poll numbers have turned around — with a vengeance. TAC editor Scott McConnell was convinced, as Foer noted at the time, that public opinion, including conservative opinion, would do a turnaround on the war — and he was right. Foer, who opined that, “over time,” the TAC-Buchanan analysis would prove irrelevant, has been proved spectacularly wrong. TAC is on the way up, and not just in terms of circulation: TNR, on the other hand, is on the way down. The magazine’s efforts to re-position itself to blend in to the generally anti-interventionist consensus on the left, is a “surefire flop.” In order to pull it off, they’d, for one, have to get rid of Marty Peretz and his embarrassingly racist screeds, which describe Arabs (and all Muslims) as little more than savages, and they’ll have to do a lot more than re-design their website to make their tired politics palatable.
TNR — wrong about the war, wrong about TAC, and wrong about nearly everything.
Will Grigg has an excellent new E-Zine, Pro Libertate, here. Will posted a piece of mine in his first issue on the collateral benefits of liberating Iran. Here’s the lead – full text at his e-zine and at my blog, where comments & carping are always welcome.
LIBERATING IRAN, ENSLAVING AMERICA
by James Bovard
The Bush administration is reportedly considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. Many people have commented on how the U.S. military is already overstretched and cannot afford another major war. But little attention has been focused on how the American political system is also at the breaking point….
…. If Bush does bomb Iran, the chain reaction could wreck American democracy. The Bush administration shows no signs of developing either an allergy to power or an addiction to truth. The American republic cannot afford to permit a president to remain above the law and the Constitution indefinitely. Anything that raises the odds of a terror attack reduces the odds of reining in the government.
